Awards

• Winner of Forward Prize for Best Collection 2018 (UK)

Overview

The highly anticipated collection by Danez Smith- 'One of the year's essential books' NPR *WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2018* *A Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry 2017* *A Financial Times and Telegraph Book of the Year 2018* ' Smith's poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy' The New Yorker Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a ground-breaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don't Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality - the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood - and an HIV-positive diagnosis. 'Some of us are killed / in pieces,' Smith writes, 'some of us all at once.' Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes an America where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

Full Product Details

9781784742041

Table of Contents

Reviews

This book is poetry as fierce fire. There is such intelligence and fervor in these poems about black men and their imperiled bodies, gay men and their impassioned bodies, what it means to be HIV positive, and so much more. Every poem impressed me, and the level of craft here is impeccable -- Roxane Gay Danez Smith is angry, erotic, politicized, innovative, classical, a formalist, an activist, and blends all of this without seeming to strain... This will be one of the year's essential books -- Craig Morgan Teicher * NPR, 2017 Poetry Preview * Danez Smith's is a voice we need now more than ever as living, feeling, complex, and conflicted beings. These poems of love extend beyond the erotic into the struggle for unity-not despite the realities of race but precisely because of what race has caused us to make of and do to one another. Don't Call Us Dead gives me a dose of hope at a time when such a thing feels hard to come by. This is a mighty work, and a tremendous offering -- Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Life on Mars [An] achingly gorgeous poetry collection by the brilliant Danez Smith ... There is a hope here, pleas and prayers; these poems pierce and they burn, they work as incantations, they lift you up, but refuse to settle you back down. They are miraculous, sublime; if you do one thing for yourself this summer, let it be to read this book, and linger over each and every word * Nylon * Elegy meets celebration of the black male body on every page . . . Smith can't help but be breathtaking in style and substance -- Porochista Khakpour * Virginia Quarterly Review * Where the stakes of living are high, Danez Smith puts their body right on the front line-`i survived yesterday,' they write, `spent it ducking bullets.' In an America that conspires against black, brown, queer, and trans bodies, Danez writes poems of insistence and resistance; they anticipate a better world for all of us `where everything is sanctuary & nothing is a gun.' -- D. A. Powell Smith transcends elegy in this intimate, humorous, and biting collection in which he writes of desire, mortality, white supremacy, and more -- Top 10 Poetry for Fall 2017 * Publishers Weekly * Danez Smith is an original - that rare blend between raw blinding light, an instinct for the well aright line, the courage to walk into his own love and pain armed only with the fragile hope of words, and a fire so unique it's all his own. In Don't Call Us Dead he demands we stand only in the truth of our own fear and build a love that's so redemptive and real. If you have ever lost faith, if you want to believe in life, then you must read this book - it will humble and uplift you, leave you understanding that in the face of it all, there is only awe -- Chris Abani Part indelible elegy, part glorious love song to `those brown folks who make / up the nation of my heart,' Smith's powerhouse collection is lush with luminous imagery, slick rhythms, and shrewd nods to Lucille Clifton, Beyonce, and Diana Ross. Incandescent, indispensable, and, yes, nothing short of a miracle -- starred review * Booklist *

Danez Smith's is a voice we need now more than ever as living, feeling, complex, and conflicted beings. These poems of love extend beyond the erotic into the struggle for unity-not despite the realities of race but precisely because of what race has caused us to make of and do to one another. Don't Call Us Dead gives me a dose of hope at a time when such a thing feels hard to come by. This is a mighty work, and a tremendous offering -- Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Life on Mars Danez Smith is angry, erotic, politicized, innovative, classical, a formalist, an activist, and blends all of this without seeming to strain. Smith's 2014 debut [insert] boy was a blistering critique of American racism and a homoerotic anthem; this follow-up amps things up considerably, ferociously excoriating years of police violence against black Americans and darkly accounting for recent events. Alongside these deeply personal political poems are love poems, a crown of sonnets, and all sorts of extended meditations on his central themes of race, sexuality, and violence. This will be one of the year's essential books -- Craig Morgan Teicher * NPR, 2017 Poetry Preview * This book is poetry as fierce fire. There is such intelligence and fervor in these poems about black men and their imperiled bodies, gay men and their impassioned bodies, what it means to be HIV positive, and so much more. Every poem impressed me, and the level of craft here is impeccable -- Roxane Gay Smith transcends elegy in this intimate, humorous, and biting collection in which he writes of desire, mortality, white supremacy, and more -- Top 10 Poetry for Fall 2017 * Publishers Weekly * There's no better way to end your summer than with this achingly gorgeous poetry collection by the brilliant Danez Smith, in which they evoke an afterlife where all the young black men who have been killed by police gather together and form a new reality, a post-reality, one in which compassion and security are the common language, rather than fear and suspicion. Don't Call Us Dead also addresses disease and mortality, desire and love; the poems can serve as indictments of our contemporary culture, but they are also full of forgiveness and understanding. There is a hope here, pleas and prayers; these poems pierce and they burn, they work as incantations, they lift you up, but refuse to settle you back down. They are miraculous, sublime; if you do one thing for yourself this summer, let it be to read this book, and linger over each and every word * Nylon *

This book is poetry as fierce fire. There is such intelligence and fervor in these poems about black men and their imperiled bodies, gay men and their impassioned bodies, what it means to be HIV positive, and so much more. Every poem impressed me, and the level of craft here is impeccable -- Roxane Gay Extraordinary... Smith gives us the whole arc of the experience, in a language whose pleasure shines through even the bleakest details... Their poems are enriched to the point of volatility, but they pay out, often, in sudden joy. Smith's style has a foot in slam and spoken word, scenes that reach people who might not buy a slim volume of poems. But they also know the magic trick of making writing on the page operate like the most ecstatic speech. And they are, in their cadences and management of lines, deeply literary. -- Dan Chiasson * The New Yorker * Danez Smith is angry, erotic, politicized, innovative, classical, a formalist, an activist, and blends all of this without seeming to strain... This will be one of the year's essential books -- Craig Morgan Teicher * NPR, 2017 Poetry Preview * Danez Smith's is a voice we need now more than ever as living, feeling, complex, and conflicted beings. These poems of love extend beyond the erotic into the struggle for unity-not despite the realities of race but precisely because of what race has caused us to make of and do to one another. Don't Call Us Dead gives me a dose of hope at a time when such a thing feels hard to come by. This is a mighty work, and a tremendous offering -- Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Life on Mars [An] achingly gorgeous poetry collection by the brilliant Danez Smith ... There is a hope here, pleas and prayers; these poems pierce and they burn, they work as incantations, they lift you up, but refuse to settle you back down. They are miraculous, sublime; if you do one thing for yourself this summer, let it be to read this book, and linger over each and every word * Nylon * Elegy meets celebration of the black male body on every page . . . Smith can't help but be breathtaking in style and substance -- Porochista Khakpour * Virginia Quarterly Review * Where the stakes of living are high, Danez Smith puts their body right on the front line-`i survived yesterday,' they write, `spent it ducking bullets.' In an America that conspires against black, brown, queer, and trans bodies, Danez writes poems of insistence and resistance; they anticipate a better world for all of us `where everything is sanctuary & nothing is a gun.' -- D. A. Powell Smith transcends elegy in this intimate, humorous, and biting collection in which he writes of desire, mortality, white supremacy, and more -- Top 10 Poetry for Fall 2017 * Publishers Weekly * Danez Smith is an original - that rare blend between raw blinding light, an instinct for the well aright line, the courage to walk into his own love and pain armed only with the fragile hope of words, and a fire so unique it's all his own. In Don't Call Us Dead he demands we stand only in the truth of our own fear and build a love that's so redemptive and real. If you have ever lost faith, if you want to believe in life, then you must read this book - it will humble and uplift you, leave you understanding that in the face of it all, there is only awe -- Chris Abani Part indelible elegy, part glorious love song to `those brown folks who make / up the nation of my heart,' Smith's powerhouse collection is lush with luminous imagery, slick rhythms, and shrewd nods to Lucille Clifton, Beyonce, and Diana Ross. Incandescent, indispensable, and, yes, nothing short of a miracle -- starred review * Booklist *

Author Information

Danez Smith's debut poetry collection, insert boy, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award. Smith has received fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, and has published poems in Granta, Poetry and The Best American Poetry. Smith lives in Minneapolis.

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